I’ve not posted anything for over a year and have been working on non-technology writing projects in recent months.

It’s possible I will return at some point, but in the meantime, it represents a good summary of the technological mischief I was getting up to in the years 2007-2018. During that time I was a technology futurist for some major, national clients including JISC and a freelance technology writer. In 2012, my book, ‘Web 2.0 and beyond’ was published.

If you need to contact me, the details are in the ‘About the author’ page.

My Web 2.0 report, written for JISC, way back in 2007, is fast approaching its tenth anniversary.

I had a quick look at Google Scholar to see how the citations were doing and was pleased to see it has now passed the 2,000 mark. Surprisingly, even last year it received 90 citations, despite its age, which means, given how the technology has changed, that some of core concepts are still relevant.

Reading through it again, the thing that stands out most, as far as changes are concerned, is that Facebook is only mentioned a couple of times. Though one comment perhaps pointed to the future:

As one lecturer recently found out, it is easier to join with the herd and discuss this week’s coursework online within FaceBook (a popular social networking site) than to try and get the students to move across to the institutional VLE.

The other huge difference is the term ‘Web 2.0’ is rarely used these days; everyone uses social media.

Astonishingly, today marks the tenth anniversary of this blog. I don’t post very often these days, partly as I only work part-time and also, perhaps, a sign of the times as so many of us are paying more attention to Facebook and Twitter. But, back in the day, there was a post a week, covering all sorts of technical stuff whipped in with some jokey items on the state of the ‘business lunch’ in modern times.

Looking back through the blog it is remarkable not only to see what sorts of technical debates were in the air, but also what a record there is of what I was up to in the years when I was running Intelligent Content Ltd and handling futurology for JISC. As I read through the old posts, events I had all but forgotten came back to me: Leeds University’s computer jubilee event (with free, hexadecimal beer), interviewing Richard Stallman, Oxford’s Open Source and XML workshops, Nottingham’s Festival of Words, and the EU’s ICT event in Lyon (there’ll be no more of that I guess for us Brits).

On the technical front, ten years ago it was Second Life (Reuters were advertising for a journalist to report from inside the virtual world that everyone was talking about), the sustainability of open source software, Microsoft launching a coffee table with a screen, XML, and 3-D web searching.

And of course Web 2.0. This is was being discussed everywhere in early 2007. Time magazine had just put a mirror on its front page and announced that their Person of the Year was ‘You’, the reader, acting together through the new forms of social media.

One of the first posts concerned the formal launch of a report I wrote for JISC on the subject. This proved to be a spectacular success, and to date has had over 100,000 downloads and 1,900 citations. It also led on to me being commissioned to write a book, “Web 2.0 and Beyond” – still available from all good bookshops as they say.

What will be the big techie story in ten years’ time? The increasing impact of AI and robotics on work I suspect, but who can say, ten years is a very, very long time in technology.

Recently I’ve been working with activereach to help them with their blogging activities. Here’s the latest piece I’ve written for them, summarising industry predictions for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in 2017.

DDoS attacks involve flooding a victim’s network with data requests in order to knock it out of action. This is done either to stop the organization operating for a period of time or to divert IT staff attention whilst a data theft takes place. Last year there was a significant rise in the number and scale of attacks and it seems likely this trend will continue in 2017 with many in the industry talking about “terabit attacks”.

The joke in the valley is, “Help wanted. Programmer / designer wanted for state-of-the-art Silicon Valley telepresence software company making collaborative work easy across geography and time zone. Must be willing to relocate to San Francisco.” It’s just nuts.

I was recently approached by Brian Kelly, who runs UK Web Focus, about writing a blog item about a workshop I ran at the Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) in 2003. This would form part of a series of blog posts on the conference, which has been running for almost twenty years.

After a few days of dredging memories from deep within my brain, the blog post is written and is now published on the IWMW website.

The 2003 workshop was about Web-based research expertise systems and, in particular, work I had been leading at the University of Nottingham on the East Midlands Research Expertise Database (EMRED).

It was a long time ago, and a lot has changed, both in terms of technology and in the way universities now handle their engagements with business. So it’s been a fascinating exercise to pause for a moment and look back.